Lightly grill eggplant, squash and zucchini. Blacken peppers on grill, place in paper bag for a few minutes, then remove the blackened skin, seeds and slice. On a sheet of plastic wrap layer eggplant, zucchini, squash and peppers. Mix goat cheese and sour cream and spread a thin layer on top of vegetables. Roll in a spinach tortilla. Refrigerate for up to two hours. To serve, slice into 1/4 inch pieces.

The install is super-easy. Just boot off the CD and answer a few questions.

So, now I have two Nexenta boxen, with about 1TB of storage online. Which brings me to why I did this in the first place: ZFS.

I really hate Linux Software RAID. I hate it so much that I don’t use it. This meant that my home storage was more or less unprotected, which sucks. I don’t have anything irreplacable on these servers, but still, it’s good form to RAID.

I was having a problem with Solaris’s Basic Security Module. I’d make changes to the audit_control and run “audit -s”, but it didn’t look like it was having an effect. Or at least it wasn’t taking effect for every process.

It turns out that each process’s audit flags are set at process create time, and that each process it forks off inherit the parent’s audit id.

Okay, valuable things when learning ruby:
* ri – This is like “perldoc”. Use it to view the live ruby documentation.
* irb – Interactive Ruby. This is like the perl debugger.
** IRB Tab Completion — Use this to view every available method on every object.
* gems – A packaging system and source code repository (kinda like CPAN)
** RubyGems

Since this isn’t documented anywhere in the ruby install docs that I can find… If you want your Ruby build to have openssl support, you’ll need to compile with –with-openssl-dir=, pointing at your OpenSSL build.

It seems kind of basic, but it doesn’t show up in a ./configure –help, and it’s not anywhere in the docs that I can find.

I thought jetlag was primarily a sleep disorder. I thought I’d just have a tough time getting to sleep because of the time difference. This I can understand. You were going to bed at 2300 GMT, now you’re going to bed at 1400 GMT. It’s understandable that the body would go “huh? It’s the middle of the afternoon!”. I thought that I’d just be tired today.

Instead, it’s just bizarre. It’s not that I’m tired, because then I think I could deal with it better. I feel well rested, but fatigued and disoriented. I feel slow, like the rest of the world is travelling very fast. My thoughts aren’t well organized, and my coordination is…. off. It’s has all the symptoms of being sleepy, without actually being tired.

Dear Endocrine System,
I feel I owe you some of you an apology. While you’ve been working so hard to keep my body in balance, I’ve been undercutting your efforts. To those of you I’ve inconvenienced tonight, I’d like to apologize individually.

Pineal Gland. You may be wondering why it is that it’s 6 in the morning and we haven’t gotten a wink of sleep. You may be wondering what the hell is happening to all the melatonin you’ve been pumping into blood all night. You may even see this all-nighter as a personal failure. Don’t feel bad. It’s not your fault. While you’ve been squirting the melatonin, I’ve been chugging the coffee drinks.

That’s also the reason you’ve been working so hard, Pancreas. For all the caffeine those drinks have, they have a lot more raw, adulterated sugar. You’ve been a real champ, pushing out all that insulin. I appreciate it. You’re my favorite gland. Now could you please, PLEASE cut it out with the stomach acid? Isn’t 7 hours of heartburn enough?

Adrenal Glands. No apology for you. You guys freak out at every little thing, and frankly, I’m sick of it. The sudden drop in blood sugar is just the pancreas doing their job. It’s really, REALLY, nothing to worry about. The adrenaline you’re releasing is doing nothing more than wigging me out, and breaking down into more sugar, making the poor pancreas work even harder. Shame on you. Whoa! Whoa! Calm down! That’s exactly what I’m talking about. I’m not attacking you. Just calm the hell down, and cut it out with the fight-or-flight.

Pituitary? Hypothalamus? I don’t know what you guys are doing up there, but I have a sneaking suspicion you guys are the only ones keeping this boat together. Good work guys. Oh, and pituitary? Keep them endorphins coming. They’re awesome.

Finally, Kidneys. Although you’re not always seen as a member of the Endocrine team, I want you to know I appreciate your work the most. You’ve been pulling double duty, removing all this crap from my blood, while doing your very best to keep my blood pressure down. How have I repaid you? By not drinking enough water. My apologies, friend. Have a drink on me.

The original was really plain and uninteresting, so I messed with the levels a bit in an attempt to cut through the fog and get some detail. Not very sucessful. So I went the opposite direction, shifting the histogram down just mask out the foggy bits. That had the side effect of accentuating the water, which I really like. It also gives it a kind of “twilight” feel.